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Tuesday, July 1, 2014

A Meditation on Light

It has always been a source of amusement to me that insects
are so attracted to light. I still laugh at the scene from Pixar’s A Bug’s
Life, where we see two flies next to a bug zapper. As the one fly approaches the light in a trance-like
state, the first fly screams, “No Harry, no! Don’t look at the light!” to which
fly number two responds in a monotone voice, moments before perishing, “I can’t
help it. It’s so beautiful!”

We laugh,
but over the years I have noticed that humans, too share this attraction to
light. Obviously not unto death in the same way as an insect, but have you ever
been riding passenger in a car at night down a mountain road? Perhaps this is a personal issue, but on the
rare occasion that a car passes by going the other direction, I find it very
hard to keep my eyes from staring straight into the light. It ruins my night vision and even hurts a
little, but it takes quite a bit of self control to keep from staring straight
into the oncoming headlights. But why is
that? Why this attraction to the light?
I believe that man was created with a need for light. Not only does sunlight provide our bodies
with the necessary Vitamin D, but it can also provide us with comfort and peace
when used as a night-light for children, etc.

But where
does this need come from? Man was
created with a desire to be with God, a desire that was no longer able to be
satisfied after the fall. No longer
could man commune with God in the same way.
James 1:17 calls God “the Father of the heavenly lights” (NIV). In Revelation 21:23, we are told that the
city of God “does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of
God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.” So it seems that our desire to be close to
light stems from our desire to be close to God.

Now
yesterday as I sat on the edge of a cliff staring out at North Chickamauga
Pocket Wilderness, I began to think about how much people miss by not looking
up. There is so much beauty contained outside of the usual 45° that we tend to
look at. Because of this, far too many
people in my generation have never seen a shooting star, never fully
appreciated a sunset, and never watched magnificent thunder clouds roll in over
the land. As I sat there staring out
over the river stretching out below me, I contemplated the reason for such a
tragedy. Then it occurred to me that it
all had to do with light.

Let me
explain myself. Ancient civilizations
used the sky to tell them everything.
The sky told them when the seasons changed, what direction they were
traveling, and even what time it was. All
of the famous explorers that we learned about in school, Columbus, Magellan,
Marco Polo, etc. found their way around the world by the stars. But skip ahead a couple hundred years to the
invention of the light bulb. Now whole
cities could be lit with the installation of light bulbs. No longer did man need to use the light of
the moon to walk by night when he had a street light that worked much more
conveniently. Skip ahead another century
and a half, and you have reached present day.
Now the light from metropolitan cities blots out the night sky, every
person has a smart phone that they can text, surf the web, and play games on. The brightest, most immediate source of light
is no longer the night sky, it is our technology. So it occurred to me that due to man’s innate
attraction to light, he naturally gravitates toward the brightest, or most
immediate source. Why look up at the
night sky when the lights of the city block it out, and the light of our
iPhones is a much more immediate source.

What a
shame it is that my generation does not escape the man-made light for the
natural light more often. “The heavens
declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1,
NIV), yet we would rather stare at the latest YouTube video of a meteor that
fell in Russia than actually go outside and find our own shooting star. The man-made light is so attractive to us
that I see more and more couples sitting next to each other texting on their
phones, and less and less people from my generation know what it is like to
stare up at the stars with the one you love.­
So let me encourage you not to let the summer pass by without finding
the Milky Way. Detach yourself from your
electronics, and look up once in a while! You might just be amazed at what you
see...

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About Me

Look for the flannel in a crowd and you'll find me. I was born and raised in Orlando, but Tennessee is where my heart is. I'm a Bryan Lion, and a country boy from the city. But first and foremost, I am a Christian.